SARATOGA SPRINGS -- Three families, special guests of the Saratoga Springs Lions Club, watched their children's past unfold onscreen during the club's Thursday lunch meeting. Club President Bill Gibeault premiered a documentary that he and his company, Story Mavericks, made about the Lions helping these kids.

Like all service organizations, the Lions champion certain causes. The Spa City club is dedicated to community needs regarding sight, hearing, diabetes and youth. Two of their guest families faced challenges with their children's sight since birth and the Lions Eye Institute was there to help.

"People think we Lions come to a meeting every week and wear horns and wave big hats around," Gibeault said. "We do real work raising funds and there are real people behind these stories."

Colin Brady, 15, is a freshman at Saratoga Springs High School now. He watched the documentary show clips of him as a tiny newborn weighing 1 pound and 10 ounces, frail and red and with tightly shut eyes, and he smiled.

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"I never get tired of seeing my baby pictures," he said. "It's always exciting to see where I came from and think about where I am now."

Brady was born at 24 weeks' gestation. Because he was so premature, his eyes were still fused shut. When his eyes did develop, he and his parents faced immense challenges.

"Colin had a vitreous hemorrhage in his left eye," explained his mother, Angela. This is a leakage of blood into the areas in and around the clear gel that fills the space between the lens and the retina of the eye. "So the doctors had to stop the bleeding and remove the blood. The resulting scar tissue damaged Colin's vision, leaving him blind in that eye. The other eye is fine."

Brady is taking Project the Way pre-engineering courses at school. He is on the varsity swim team, and he wants to go into automotive engineering.

"I think when your vision is limited, you see more detail," he said.

Owen Hunter, a fifth-grader at Slingerlands Elementary School, had cataract surgery as a one-month-old. His vision is now 20/50, and he plays soccer and skis, as well as playing several musical instruments.

"The only thing I have real trouble seeing is the tiny print in the 'Captain Underpants' books," he said. "I take it as a challenge for my eyes."

A third child in the Lions' lives is Morgan McCarthy, now 18 and a freshman at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Instead of vision problems, she faced cerebral palsy, trouble walking and sometimes intense isolation. The Lions Club's program Gliding Stars, which puts kids into skates and helps them onto the ice, gave her a chance to do what other children did Saturday mornings.

In the film, McCarthy gets tears in her eyes when describing how much the skating rink outings meant to her.

"I will always have these happy memories," she said. "When I was out on the ice, I felt normal."